I have a confession to make.  I think when I was a Slytherin when I was a teenager.  I know they're supposed to be the "evil" Hogwarts house, but in the lore, Slytherin are not intrinsically evil - they are, however, the house of the clever and ambitious.  Values are a shifting landscape and, at the time, I was hungry and ambitious.  Coming from a refugee family, I always knew that I would be responsible for my future, and that education would pave that way.  

I loved to read, and cut a large swath through the books that kids read at that age.  My favorites included Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Michael Crichton, T.H. White, Isaac Asimov, and so on.  Clever swashbuckling protagonists swept up in grand adventures - even writing these authors' names down makes me want to pick up their books.  I used to have these vivid action-adventure dreams with my version of Tolkien's Fellowship, and wake up sad that I had to leave my friends and they were fading from my memory.  But if you had given me at that time a list of values to force-rank, you might have seen "intelligence" or "analytical thinking" up there but "courage" would be in the bottom half.

I love that the sorting hat "takes your choice into consideration."  Because courage demands choice, it requires it, and choice, at some level, demands courage.  All values are choiceful but being brave especially so.  Courage implies fear and the willing of self to choose in the face of fear.

When I was a teenager, I didn't have it in me yet to be brave, because my capacity to choose wasn't fully developed.  Most young people have sociopathic tendencies because they haven't had the life experiences to develop empathy - to understand why their parents are worried, to see that their peers are as early in their maturity as they are themselves, to be thoughtful of other people and feel with them.  

But as our identities are formed and we get to shape our values, we get to choose whether we will be Gryffindor, whether we will be brave.  And sometimes it's no easier for grown adults than it is for Harry Potter.  Many of us spend a lot of time in large organizations with a political layer, and we feel constrained by what is expected of us.  We look to our leaders for support, they look to their leaders, and it's turtles all the way up and mass disillusionment.  Even the guy at the top feels constrained - by a board, activist shareholders, a large diverse body of employees, the unsympathetic market, and their own probably-feeling-neglected family.

Philip Zimbardo at Stanford (yes, of the Stanford Prison Experiment) has sought to redeem himself with his later research.  I've been very interested in his Heroic Imagination Project, which focuses on the psychology of everyday heroism and how to get people to think of themselves as a hero.  Your identity shapes your decisions - just like when you remind Asian women they are Asian, they do better on math tests, but if you remind them of their gender, they do worse.  You have to believe you have the potential to be a hero in order to be a hero, you have to be able to envision that narrative of yourself - "I am the kind of person who does this."  

So how do we be grown-ups then, will-fully make choices every day that shape the world around us?  It's probably not as easy as whispering "Gryffindor" to the Sorting Hat...  but maybe that's not a bad start.  

I just came back from Indonesia and we had two long layovers in Japan.  I've been to Japan before but something about this trip struck the right chord for me.  There was a time when the Japanese care and artistry with which they do everything was something to be admired from a distance, to nod and give a moment of appreciation but not necessarily something to take into your self, your life, your soul.

On this trip it was different.  There was something about the Japanese approach that called to me.  The care for your art, the desire to do it well for the sake of doing it well.  I keep using the word 'art' because there isn't a better word for it in my lexicon.  Art is that which is designed that makes a human being feel, and the care with which the Japanese approach their craft, their cuisine, their typography, that made me feel.  If you watch a sushi chef with his knife, and an understanding of how hard it is to do what he does (and I've tried, believe me), it gives you faith in human will and passion again.  To make the perfect amaebi, hand-warmed sushi rice, custard-like tamago, it must take passion.

I think that when I was younger, maybe I didn't notice because I hadn't developed the judgment to notice.  I couldn't tell the difference between good and average sushi, bad liquor vs. wondrous liquor, good tamago and everyday tamago.  And I do think I miss something by noticing the difference.  But I also gain something as well.

Every door we pass through as we age shuts behind us.  In that small click as it closes is both tragedy and triumph.  I hate endings which is why something inside me sobs when there's an irreversible change, but I love beginnings - I love beginnings - and all it takes is the right narrative to see a new beginning every day. 

I was watching an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference with the Emanuel brothers (Rahm and Ari) the other day.  They're quite controversial figures - Rahm being the former Obama White House chief of staff and current Chicago mayor and Ari the CEO of William Morris and muse of Entourage's Ari Gold character.  But as I watched the interview, I became increasingly fascinated by them - not for their accomplishments or beliefs, but rather the passion they have for what they do.  It emanates from their very pores.  And they've stayed sharp because they continue to be passionate about what they do - they're dead sharp and I love it.  

It reminds me as I move forward in my career that you can stay sharp, that our human will, our human passions, our constant and active assent to our lives - "I will" - does not have to end.  There is a new beginning to be captured every day, if we chart for our selves our own narrative.

I'm sitting on a hammock on a lake in Rogers, Arkansas towards the tail-end of a 2-month cross-country-twice roadtrip. It's been the adventure I needed, the slow path, the exploration of other ways of living, and an exercise in rebuilding my tolerance for discomfort. It took almost this long - days of not knowing where I would be sleeping that night, camping in the freezing cold (Adam says it wasn't that cold but it was), skipping showers, invading for a night the homes of the people unfortunate enough to know us, long hours of driving, enduring the dripping heat of the South in the summertime - to shake off the residual costs of working for a big company.

It's been awhile since I've written anything here, and sometimes I've wondered if I've run out of things to say. While I loved the first half of the 9 years I spent at this company - too much, because it took me this long to leave - it became a place where it was hard for me to be fully myself. I felt myself becoming more risk-averse, watching myself in places like airports and hotels, managing my time too tightly and not being present with loved ones, and yes, not writing anymore because the ideas were less bountiful and I had less time to simmer on them.

And it wasn't the company - this is a company that has done wonderfully by me, has supported me in pursuing all manner of interesting and varied opportunities, and has - at least at the level of culture, if not every individual - a real care for its people. It was a glorious place to build a career, and I've met many lifelong friends there (some of whom were gracious enough to host a couple of itinerant bums on a cross-country-twice roadtrip).

It was that it became hard to be an idiosyncratic individual, a specific human being with passions, to speak the truth about an institution while serving as a leader within that institution, to see the difference between the politics that drive outcomes and the real work that needs to be done. Leadership is political. Innovation is political. Because both operate in environments of uncertainty with other people who have stakes. And deep within the walls of big companies, you're not always exposed to the unforgiving market that could serve as arbiter.

We did good work, we built a new large organization from the ground-up and made sizable investments that are seeing lucrative returns - it was a true honor to be part of an iconic period in the life of a massive old company. But I got tired - it wears on you having to navigate the personalities, egos, evolving identities, alliances, and multitude of strong opinions, and there were whole days where I wondered whether I had accomplished anything of value in pushing more sand uphill. I left because I want to do things and see them take shape in front of me. I wanted to build things just to see if it were possible. I wanted to wear pajamas to the airport and have that be okay.

It's hard because one of the many reasons why I stayed so long (in addition to my awesome colleagues) is that I believe in the power of large institutions, the leverage it offers for a single individual to make an outsized impact, and I believe that the market can be a force for good. I still think this is true but the existing models are creaking in the new world we find ourselves in, and the people who make it into leadership positions are usually the low-risk candidates who aren't inclined to take potentially career-ending leaps. And let's not talk about institutional patterns that result in young people being underutilized, minorities being undervalued, women being under-recognized, hardworking people who don't fit the credential bar being filtered out too early, and generally different-seeming people being under-selected because of culture-fit criteria. And the well-meaning people who populate big companies are too busy responding to emails and building consensus to reflect on the current state, and mostly too risk-averse (because changing institutional patterns can be painfully hard and personally agonizing) to own the necessary change. Time seems to be the enemy, but we forget that the time to reflect on priorities is always an investment that pays.

I include myself among the responsible for the dynamics described above - I know it's not easy. Something inside me got worn down by trying to carve institutional stone with water - I probably should have tried fire rather than water more often than I did. Maybe a better person could have tackled the full measure of what engineers call "technical debt," but I had to leave to pull out a new sheet of paper. Ultimately, despite the abiding loyalty I still have to the firm, it was a company and not a cause.  

I don't know what my cause will be but I think it'll be related to people, making them more productive, creative, thoughtful, more empathetic, more human, giving them more of their time back for what and who they love. As Jed Bartlet used to say on a really great show, "What's next?"

I went over a curb head over heels on New Years Eve and ended up with a badly sprained ankle.  My universe since has been about crutches, canes, research, pineapple and supplements, as I try to heal up faster than the average bear.

Since the best time to blog is when you're laid up with an injury, I thought I'd jot a few thoughts down on what I've learned and relearned from this whole thing.

1.  Pain is not that big a deal.

When I was little, I was terrified of spankings and would cry when I fell down.  Pain was horrific.  When I was older, I would put up defenses against emotional pain - I ended relationships too soon, I invested in independence too much, I avoided failure and sought security (in my own way), I tried to be devil-may-care and mostly succeeded.  

But as I get older and my sisters go through agonizing labor and I have more failures under my belt and there are more people who don't like me (though hopefully more do like me as well) and I've had the experience of financial losses (as well as gains), I realize that pain is not that big a deal.  I used to say, you just have to suck it up, but it's more than that, more than resilience.

Pain is an opportunity.  It's an opportunity to learn, to grow, to feel.  It's a chance to revisit what is important and to connect with those you love in new ways, and maybe depend upon them.  We love Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile, which is one of the least edited and most brilliant books I've ever read.  In his eyes, you are antifragile if you flourish from hardship.  If you can manage to make hard things make you become better, you are indomitable.

2.  Decisions, not speed.

With my sprained ankle, I've gotten really slow. At first, when I was thinking about how slow I would be, I was exasperated at the waste of time. I imagined myself laid up in bed.  

I've actually been ultra-productive over the past few days, frankly probably more productive than I would have been if I hadn't sprained my ankle. And not because I've been laid up in bed being waited on hand and foot.  I've been moving about, going to mail letters, lately running nearby errands, as well as working on my laptops.  I've been ultra-productive because I've focused on making small decisions, i.e. "I will act," over and over again.  I will put clothes in the washing machine, I will fill out that application, I will answer that one email.

There's something about being physically not well that focuses your priorities wonderfully. I've realized that lack of action or procrastination is usually due to slow or nonexistent decision-making. 

In the world of innovation where I live, it's the decisions you don't make that slow you down, not the speed of your motions.  

With the cluttered mental desktop that's so common these days, where other people you don't even care about are somehow allowed to pile stuff on, it's particularly the "I will not" decisions that are painful - "I will not answer that email," "I will not pick up that call," "I will not check that voicemail," "I will not take that meeting out of civility or duty," "I will not read my junkmail, "I will not keep my house pristine," "I will not put on makeup today." But that's how you make time for important things and that's how you clear your desktop to keep making good decisions, and decisions are what keep you moving forward and growing and human.

3.  Love really is all you need.  And food and shelter and health insurance and a few other knick-knacks.

The Beatles had it right.  I've lived a grand old life and had never-to-be-repeated experiences of joy and wonder all over the world, and have no regrets.  But I've come to realize that love and living don't really require very much.

I have mostly enough clothes and books to last me the rest of my life, an excellent bicycle with a basket, the washer and dryer of my dreams, a little house just big enough to have people over but not too big to clean in one afternoon, in the location of my dreams and near a Vietnamese grocery store, and I can cook just about anything.

I still want to travel and we have plans to live in (not visit) a few different places, but we don't need a lot.  It has to make me wonder though why we work so much..  something to noodle on in this new year :)  Happy new year!

It's no longer Friday and we're no longer drinking wine, but I just can't seem to get this idea of the implications of capturing the value of your own time of my head.

Peter Diamandis talks extensively about the difference between linear returns - e.g. selling your time by the hour - and accelerating returns - e.g. selling your knowledge-based product over and over.

Why does anyone sell their time directly rather than the productized version?  The answer is risk.  It's the risk  (and sometimes asymmetric information) related to the ambiguity about what the outcomes will be, risk that is offloaded by an employee making a steady income and shouldered by an owner of financial capital. 

Once productized, the time becomes almost tangible - has a name, a logo, a color, brand, and maybe some patents to its name.  As the once generic-seeming time becomes more distinctive, it takes on the weight of brand identity - the value it has created in the past, the pricing and "packaging" from which you can infer value to be expected, the case studies and references that bolster credibility.  And critically, the value of that product can be tracked in a way that is much harder to do with time.  We've created this artificial construct of intellectual property rights but it doesn't apply to most of the things that we do with our time, because most of the things we do are not new, distinctive, and substantive.  

What if it didn't have to be substantive?  What if individuals could make little product "bubbles" that were each unique, and we could charge micropayments for each bubble?  A cent, a fraction of a bitcoin.  For a sketch, a contract, a project management template, slide, few lines of code.  We would need an ultra low-friction system that could take in product bubbles, assess distinctiveness, dynamically price, credibly convey needs-relevant characteristics, take micropayments, and pop out a useful bubble ready for consumption.  The bubbles don't have to be small but a system that can handle small bubbles will allocate value more efficiently even for large platforms.

Perhaps there will one day be a time where we are all born into this world as equals, with no claim on natural resources or financial capital, and we make our way in the world by creating value for others with our time.  We may begin our lives in debt to society but we gradually pay that debt down as we grow into adulthood and productivity.  There will be new opportunities to take our individual identities and passions, productize our time, and use it to buy into the limited liability partnership we call society - at full value.  Sounds somewhat communist but nothing could be more choice-driven.  

Unfortunately, accelerating returns are only achieved with sources of value that are better and scalable, and probably digital.  Your barber will benefit in absolute terms from greater general efficiency and growth (e.g. cheaper and higher-quality goods, greater safety, access to information), but will fall further behind on a relative basis.  This is fundamentally why income inequality is increasing - it's because of the ability of educated individuals to create scalable value that accrues to more people.  If you cut the income inequality data and look closely, it is returns to education that is driving the inequality dynamic.  And while there's been a lot of hoopla and advice about getting a "real-life education," 88% of software developers have a college degree in contrast to a third of young Americans aged 25-29.  
So many barriers - education, information, systems, culture, currency, and so on.  But as Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Adam and I like to have a few glasses of wine on Friday nights, and sometimes it devolves into an enthusiastic whiteboarding conversation. We have a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the kitchen with dry-erase markers kept on hand for just this purpose.  I woke up in the morning to a mirror covered in scribbles that we eventually pieced together. 

This was actually the sequel to a conversation had 6 years ago with my friend Nishu, where we were figuring out how to use actual time as currency for trade.  The intent was not to demolish the use of currency; it was to solve the deep inefficiencies in how time is traded today, inefficiencies rooted largely in asymmetric information.  Outcomes or value created today are fundamentally not tied well to time contributed, which results in vast unfairness.  

But just imagine, bracketing all your skepticism for a moment, a world where information was not asymmetric, where value contributed is known by all, and the rewards of creating value in the world are shared by all.  It would change how we think about markets.  Markets today are analogous to the second-price auction model - as a buyer, you value the asset at $X but what you pay is $Y, where $Y is a little more than the seller's next-best alternative (assuming $Y is more than their value and silly things like psychology don't get in the way).  So buyers get the value of $X-$Y, and sellers get the value of $Y-cost.  But what if the buyer's value and the seller's cost were known?  What happens then?

Rather than hash through complex analytical models and reams of paper, let me tell you what I think will happen in a world where information is power, power is evenly distributed, and fairness is a generally universal moral pillar.  I think we'd split the difference in value.  Each person would get ($X-cost)/2.  Makes sense.  But what if one "person" was an employee and the other "person" was a corporation, and the asset being traded was time.  Whoa.

If this was true, then in a way, it would strangely merge some of the value sets of communism and capitalism.  Communism is about fairness and capitalism is about choice.  But what if we could create world where we could allow everyone massive freedom to do what they will with their own human capital (which is overtaking financial capital as the scarce commodity)?  What could be fairer than that?

The critical aspect here is the radical transparency of information.  Information forces fairness (in a democratic world not dominated by physical threat).  The average McDonald's franchise in the US generates $2.5 million in revenue and the average salary of an hourly worker there is $7.73.  Putting aside for now how we would find this out, what if it was factually known that the efforts of a given hourly worker were generating an incremental $100,000 of exclusive, non-overlapping earnings above and beyond what McDonald's next-best alternative was?  Wouldn't it make sense to pay that worker $66,000 per year rather than $16,000?  I'm clearly avoiding the subject of returns to financial capital here but I'll address it later and suggest a way to make it a moot question.

But we skipped over another critical element here as well - how do you do this?  The real problem was always asymmetric information.  Isn't information naturally asymmetric?  That kind of radical transparency sounds more like an ideal than a pragmatic possibility.

In response, let's take a different example.  In your typical big consulting firm, you have client projects delivered by teams.  Those projects are sold by partners with an equity stake in the company.  Each project has its own little P&L (profit-and-loss statement), and so the value of the outcomes are well-defined once the project is complete.  If we were to take a given project, whose known net value generated for the organization is $1 million, and try to put a percentage number against how much proportionate value each member of the team contributed, including the partner who sold the project, how would you do that?  Arguably, every member of the team was critical to the overall effort - i.e. without any single member, the project would not have been successful.

This is a hard question because the answer is distributed.  Each person on the team holds a fragment of the answer.  There may even be people outside the team who hold a fragment of the answer.  And each fragment is of different size - i.e. someone who has worked on the project 80 hours a week has more information than someone who has advised on the project for an hour total.  Each fragment is also of different quality - e.g. someone who is more experienced may exhibit higher-quality judgment.  Everyone is also biased towards themselves, unconsciously as well as consciously.

But what if you could put all those puzzle pieces together, and wash away most of the major errors?  Then you would have essentially a pie chart, where the whole represents the total value generated, and each slice represents the mutually exclusive proportion that each person has contributed.

Here's a probably wrong idea of how to do it:

1.  Collect a 100-point force-ranking from everybody who knows anything:  Ask each person who has a fragment of information to confidentially allocate 100 points to all the individuals on the team, based on perceived value contributed.  Each would look something like this:

• Sally = 50
  
• John = 20
  
• Bob = 10
  
• Jerry = 5
• Fred = 5
• Wanda = 3
• Will = 3
• Hal = 2
• Trent = 1
• Rod = 1

2.  Expose the 100-point force-rankings anonymously to everyone for veto:  If a majority of information holders reject a given allocation, guided by the principle of reject-if-false-intent-is-presumed (and possibly with a limit on number of rejections per person),  then that individual has one more chance to fix their allocation before their input is thrown out.  This step is to avoid gaming by individuals.  [As a slight tweak to improve accuracy, instead of a majority of information holders required to veto, the rule could be revised to "the majority of information holder hours represented." The assumption being that the more time spent on the project, the more information that individual has about value contributed (not, it is important to note, the more value the individual has contributed, time not being equivalent to value contributed).]
 
3.  Weigh each allocation based on the number of hours the assessor has spent on the project (a proxy for amount of relevant information held): While hours worked is an imperfect proxy, it is the closest thing we have to an objective, non-political measure of how much information an individual has about who has contributed what.  Someone who is working full-time on a project knows significantly more than someone advising on a few-hour-a-week basis.  If Bob's total hours spent on the project is 25% of the total, then all of the rows in his distribution are multiplied by 0.25.  By the way, to prevent gaming of hours tracked, you can also expose the number of hours worked to everyone as well and allow for another veto-edit protocol (you can even expose across all projects to identify extreme cases where someone's hours on every project add up to something beyond the realm of credibility).

4.  Then add up horizontally all the points a team member has received and divide by the total:  Points across all information holders are added for each team member, and a proportionate figure of the total derived for each member, a number that represents the best approximation of "What percent of the total value created was this individual responsible for?"

Once you have that number, you can do a lot with it.

But - we still haven't addressed the subject of returns to financial capital.  It takes financial capital to deliver on a project - there are laptops to buy, equipment rent, conference call bills to pay.  I'm going to propose a way to address this that's quite radical - why don't we have everyone contribute an equal share of the financial capital?  Then the question becomes a moot point, and all the human capital can receive 100% of their proportion of overall value created.  It's a form of a partnership, in the professional services sense, where everyone holds equal equity share in the stakes of the project.

But what if a team member doesn't have the financial capital to contribute?  In that case, the remaining team members can essentially loan them the financial capital, as an investment with some interest return, and it would be recouped when positive outcomes are achieved at the end of the project.  It is a true investment, in the sense of risk as well as rewards, and not dissimilar to how a new partner buys into a professional services firm today.

With this model, in an organization with many projects, everyone essentially becomes a partner in the enterprise.  You could even pay out all value earned in equity in the enterprise, assuming it was large enough that there was liquidity for the equity within an internal secondary market (so people can pay rent and what-not). 

Where there are projects where the value created is less clear (e.g. cost centers), you could do a tiered version of this allocation-weighing method at multiple and higher levels, e.g. at the practice, business unit, or overall firm level, among projects.  What matters is that you do it at a level where the value of outcomes are well-defined, e.g. there is a P&L.

You do need systems and protocols that are well-designed, easy for the information holders to provide input, transparent, generally automated, and hard to game.  The more you introduce asymmetric human judgment, the more you create power situations and politics. 

What I think is wonderful about this is that it creates incentives to share information within the team, between teams, and perhaps even beyond the firm.  On that last, there's a whole 'nother post that could be written about that.  Anyway, that was the result of a few glasses of wine and whiteboarding on a Friday night.

I've always found Steve Jobs to be an interesting fellow, and of all his repeatable aphorisms, I most often quote the one about the dots always connecting when you look backwards.  It's a curious thing that life is so path-dependent, particularly when you think of the narratives that we tell ourselves about how our success is based on our own effort, or what-not.

When I look back, I see a series of learning moments that arose sometimes incidentally but that shaped my life today.  I used to be afeared of freeways and driving in general, but living in LA and having a car-loving boyfriend when I was 19 inevitably forced me to become reasonably competent behind the wheel.  I learned how to manage risk by sneaking into local casinos at 17 to play California No Bust blackjack with my cousin, or sometimes the driving-distance Indian reservation with friends.  My first brush with entrepreneurship was as an assistant to a flamboyant local artist and grantwriter, building her a successful at-home business on her sunny Topanga Canyon estate.  I learned how to drive a forklift and run a call center at my first job after university, how to manage a team and give feedback, how to hire and fire people who were older than me.  At that job, I was given a photocopy of a New York Times article about a young, relatively unknown economist at the University of Chicago, named Steven Levitt.  On the basis of that article alone, I made UChicago my top-choice business school and embarked on a revelatory intellectual journey.

At my first job after business school, I asked to study markets - odd markets some of them - precision machining in aerospace, wastewater treatment equipment, health products for baby boomers, maintenance and management of clinical technology, senior living facilities, raw materials used in valve manufacturing, the future of the healthcare system, and so forth.  From far away, say in business school, each market seems alike - you think in terms of patterns so you can wrap your mind around it, that one is a traditional manufacturer, this one is a capital-intensive business.

But what I've learned over the years is that each market is like a person.  It has its own fingerprint, its own flavor, its own personalities.  An executive at a valve manufacturer doesn't see other manufacturers as its competitors - it sees only two other companies and it knows their history and skeletons and the dust on their skeletons.  There are family businesses and families working at different competing businesses.  When there's a move, it's like moving a stalk in a mountain of hay.

These differences are meaningful.  Did you know that there are virtually no third-party aftermarket provider of major parts in wastewater treatment equipment, and that OEMs have a vise-like grip on the market?  Or that parts and services can be up to 50% of the revenue for a manufacturer?  Or that the main barrier to cellulosic ethanol are the prohibitively expensive price of cellulosic enzymes that can break down tough cellulose?  Or that the reason why the experience at skilled nursing facilities is so poor compared to continuing care retirement communities is because skilled nursing is subject to the vagaries of public reimbursement policies?

If you're going to be in this business, you're going to have to respect these differences.  What's that old saying about how if you can't see the sucker, then the sucker is you.  Business ethnography takes time and patience, and good listening skills, and even better note-taking because you're going to forget most of what you think you've learned.  It also takes the ability to absorb rejection, turn hostility into chuckling, make actually pleasant small talk, to be interested in people, to drive a conversation so it's natural, and know how to come up with good questions.

It's incredibly rewarding though.  As one of my business school professors used to say, if you're doing it well, it's like putting an X-ray over an entire industry and be able to put your finger on the exact spot.

I woke up this morning feeling like I had dreamt all night of Cloud Atlas.  We had stayed up late last night watching the movie.  I'm probably in the bottom tenth percentile in both being a movie buff and awareness of pop culture but I had run across some blog post that mentioned in passing the utter strangeness of this movie and of course I had to see it.

The movie was, without a doubt, deeply strange across the board but the narrative that my mind kept lingering upon was the one around the Korean clone Sonmi-451 who was built to be a disposable server in a diner, and who ultimately (and briefly) steps forward to be a catalyst for a new world and is captured and executed.

Free will and the extent to which we have any is a recurrent theme in the movie.  I know of people that would say that we are driven so much by our DNA and biochemicals and environmental factors out of our control that we are actually animals, whether or not we'd like to admit it.  The story of Sonmi-451, the perfectly cloned entity bounded by DNA and environment, helped me synthesize this - that it's not about how much free will we have, it's that we have any.  In even the tiniest microfraction of the opportunity represented by free will, we have infinite choice and it's that choice that makes us human.  

The willingness to exercise that fundamentally human capability is a defining characteristic of leadership.  I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately, examples of both triumphs and failures, how powerfully it affects the people around for better and for worse, and the relationships among leadership, choice and truth.

Leadership is a word that is thrown around so much that it seems like everyone gets their own definition - executives are often asked as a softball question in interviews, "How do you define leadership?"  To me, that's like saying, "How do you define truth?"  As Sonmi-451 says, "Truth is singular. Its versions are mistruths."  

Leadership to me is  specific - it is the ability to build confidence (and reduce perceived risk) in others so that they can make their own choices in the context of risk and uncertainty.  Leadership is about the choices that an individual makes to enable and empower the choices of others.  At the core of it is truth-based trust-building, based on both competence and values.

Here is what failures of leadership look like:  Lack of a shared vision that would enable decentralized decision-making made in lockstep.  Unwillingness to commit to well-defined priorities resulting in suboptimal resource allocation decisions.  A disjoint between the words of leaders and their actions-choices.  An evident gap between what a leader knows and the reality of the situation on the ground.  A leader that needs to be managed.  Neglect.  Low levels of responsiveness, sometimes pervasive across the organization.  Perceptions of unfairness.  Politics.  Implicit acceptance of behaviors that contradict expressed values.  Situations where it's not comfortable to speak up.  Frequent decisions made on power, out of protocol.  Problems are pushed down in the hierarchy, rather than raised up.  Leaders who offload risk to their teams rather than taking it on or serving as an umbrella.  People going to bed at night feeling bad about their jobs. 

But leadership isn't only something that people with titles do.  If leadership is about choices that enable the choices of others, and we have even the smallest iota of free will, then we can all show leadership.  We can make it so people don't go to bed feeling quite so bad about their lives.  In these small spaces, we are God.

You need more leadership when times are uncertain, when you're doing uncertain work and the ground is shifting beneath.  And look around - anyone that doesn't think we are in uncertain times has had their head stuck in the ground.  The folding in of the technology advances of the past two decades into the investments of large enterprises will be enormously disruptive.  Rising income inequality are rewriting the social contracts, and the education debt we've built up over decades of mismanagement of public primary and secondary school systems is coming up for payment.  The very nature of money - the currency of the untold trades that have created virtually all wealth in the world - is being redefined.  We need leadership more than ever.

When I was a teenager growing up in the lesser-known grittier parts of Orange County, I knew a kid about my age - let's call him John - who would make his money by stealing hubcaps and spoilers off of cars, and reselling them.  He was not a bad guy - it was an impersonal economic crime, one that was not uncommon among our peer group at that time.  But John had his limits.  He would not target any car that had a baby carseat in the back, because in his words, "It belonged to a momma."  He had a very close relationship with his own mother.

 I've been interested in the relationship between crime and environment for several years now, ever since I saw some compelling data from Martin Day on the strong correlation between income inequality and rates of homicide, across states, provinces and countries.  People don't seem to commit murder because they're poor, they commit murder because they're poorer than many of the people around them.  India, for instance, is a poor country but has a similar income equality to Switzerland and a lower homicide rate than the United States.  This kind of makes sense since poverty is fundamentally a relative term - the nobility of medieval times had a standard of living lower than many Wal-Mart employees today.  

We also see that racial and economic segregation increase the rate of violent crimes like aggravated assault and robbery.  It's no coincidence that in the US, cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, New Orleans, St. Louis and even Chicago among the big cities, are known to be among both the most segregated and most crime-ridden.  It's also probably not a coincidence that South Africa has both one of the highest levels of segregation and highest levels of violent crime (it also has a high degree of income inequality as well).

Putting on my psychologist hat, it makes me wonder about the mechanisms at the individual level that result in a higher disposition to committing crimes in these environments.  It seems to be a complex interaction among trust and trustworthiness, unwritten societal rules, and who you see as "like you."  

There's plenty of data to show that we treat people who are "like us," who have been given entrance into our mental representation of the circle of kindred, very differently than we treat people who are unlike us.  Philip Zimbardo, in his research, saw that humans are at their cruelest when they can dehumanize the other (Stanford prison experiment) and anonymize themselves (e.g. with masks or facepaint).  If what is truly evil are free personal choices to harm others who can feel, for selfish motivations, then most humans shy away from the truly evil.  They create a mental framework where it seems like, on some level, their victims are not "like them" and cannot "feel."  It's like the mafioso who are family men, yet horrifically cruel to those who belong to economic competitor groups.  You can be trustworthy within the circle of trust, but behave completely different to those you consider "out-group."  You abide by the unwritten societal rules of your group, which has its own self-governing mechanisms.

The factors that constitute whether you consider someone "in-group" are some combination of shared genetics, in-common relationships, physical proximity, income and educational levels, race, gender, values, and finally, where you live.  This final factor of where you live is important because in-group is about who you trust, and trust can be a strange thing.  We need some trust to operate in the world, to take calculated risks, and it comes in three flavors:  dispositional, situational, and institutional (Dignum 2005, Chervany 1996).  Our past experiences in a given environment shapes our dispositional trust, our personal worldview.  The context of the environment shapes our approach to situational trust, how we react to the players and situation at hand.  And institutional trust, when we can rely on the larger system, institutions and government mechanisms to enforce expected behavior, enables us to expand the group we trust (or when the converse is true, depend on a limited set of kin relationships and local protection rackets).  It's easier to see more people as "like you" when the potential cost of that trust is lower.  Where you live makes a big difference.

When we have strong governance institutions, lower levels of income inequality, and less segregation (and more in-common relationships), we see low levels of crime.  But when we have the opposite, the quicksand trifecta of weaker governance institutions, high levels of income inequality, and high segregation, we have a situation like  South Africa.  

Paul Collier has spoken and written about the role of weak governance in reinforcing the cycle of persistent poverty.  The answer has to start with good governance, which drives institutional trust, which helps suppress organized crime and promotes a private sector more attractive to investment (and more likely to create jobs).  To the average citizen, good governance looks like effective and just policing, clean well-paved streets, fast and fair public services, documented and enforced contracts and property rights, and transparent reporting and feedback systems.  

Next is skills-building, the sort of education that builds sustained advancements in human capital, so that the population can take on the jobs that are created by the private sector and alter the income dynamics.  This is not necessarily university education.  It does include capability-building around the productive use of technology, one major factor in the income discrepancy between educational classes. 

Finally, and probably most difficult, is promoting physical community spaces, next-generation civil engineering, and public school systems that enable relationships to be built across socio-economic classes.  Social groups are generally formed by the time a given individual is in their late-twenties, often in school and work environments.  There are relatively few direct opportunities to shape these formations - probably the most significant are primary and secondary schools that break the linkages between neighborhood-income and school attended.  Otherwise, a city may be subject to silent segregation, where different social groups may live close to each other but rarely interact (e.g. the Mission of San Francisco).

When I think about someone like John, who refuses to target "mommas" because they make him think of his own mother, it makes me wonder what else we can do to get people to think about others as "like them."  What stories can we share, what introductions can we make, what career opportunities can we offer.  We all win when we have more trust in our civil society.